


What's Halloween Without Some Dead People Dropping By

by sorrow_key



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Body-Sharing Shenanigans, F/F, Gen, Possession, an unhealthy amount of candy, more precisely, referenced Farah/Tina, referenced canonical not-quite death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 10:29:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16473845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrow_key/pseuds/sorrow_key
Summary: Farah shakes her head and smiles. “Alright, I give up. Today is gonna be all celebration and marketing and-” She seems to consider her decision one last time. “And no work.”Dirk cheers and internally thanks might actually be his own - but let’s be real, mostly Tina’s influence. Her girlfriend has done her good.Todd lets out a breath of relief that's in no way as subtle as he probably thinks it to be. Farah eats her sweet and adds, “Unless there’s a case, of course.”None of them expect there to be a case or anything, really, and maybe that should’ve warned Dirk - the universe is like a kettle that way. It likes to strike when no one is looking.(in which the detective agency receives some more or less familiar visitors who aren't quite as dead as previously believed.)Prompt 43: Possession





	What's Halloween Without Some Dead People Dropping By

The streets of Seattle are dark. Leaves that strayed from the city’s yellow-er parts whirl in a sudden wind. A shop light flickers, letters flashing and dimming without rhyme or reason like a spectral keysmash.

Someone is standing in front of the shop.

“Huh,” he says. “I don’t think this is it.”

Then, an annoyed sigh. “Seriously? What are you even doing?”

Masterfully lifted eyebrows greet the man from the shop window. He chokes a laugh and brings a hand to his eyes. “Seriously,” he repeats, strangely subdued, strangely amused. “Now I can do this?”

“Actually,” the man says, ”if I’m like, the universe, then wherever I go is it. Whatever I do is, uh. The thing. I’m like, the boss. Except not really. Right?”

Another sigh, even more annoyed. “If our face wasn’t the same, I would be punching you right now.”

“Hey, you already did that. You got like,” the man gestures, “ _issues_ with violence.”

A sharp intake of breath and a hiss-like exhale follows. “Okay, this is too much to unpack right now. You do remember you _murdered_ me, right? And weren’t you gonna do some universe shit?”

“Oh yeah. That. But I said sorry like, once already.”

No one replies. The shop window reflects passer-bys lucky enough to be off work despite the early hour. The leaves crunch as they walk over them, lying still and silent. Nobody pays the empty, evenly lit storefront any mind.

After all, it hasn’t changed at all.

 

***

 

Farah meticulously brushes leaves and any hint of autumn off her coat and hangs it up on the coat stander whose existence Dirk had, frankly, forgotten about.

Oh well. His jackets look great on his chair. Really adds color to the room.

“Dirk, I told you, office money isn't for candy.“

Farah looks at him, exasperated, a little disappointed and very much not surprised.

“It's marketing,“ Dirk defends through a mouthful of sugary eyeballs.

Farah shifts her disappointment from him to Todd.

“Really? You too?” She asks, gesturing to the bowl of sour vampires on Todd's desk. “I thought you'd know better.”

“Hey, Dirk has a point, right?” Todd raises his hands. Dirk internally celebrates; he loves it when people say he has a point. He especially loves it when it's his best friend saying it. 

He also happens to love holidays and candy in general, which just sweetens the deal.

“We gotta invest in our image. It's not like we're exactly swarming with clients.”

Farah sighs agajn. It's not an angry kind of sigh, so Dirk takes that as a win.

“Okay,” she asks, “but if we're not going to distribute all of _that_ , was it all really necessary?”

Dirk regards what amounts to a bagful of the best, spookiest, most classically Halloween-ish purchases he could find proudly.

“Of course. It's not just necessary, it's _essential_.”

Farah exhales. It's the sound of giving in.

“Fine, but don't complain to me when you guys get stomachaches.”

Dirk grins. “Try this one!”

Farah regards it with the wariness she gives anything from glowing substances of unknown origin to pens appearing and disappearing from the office.

(Dirk has yet to solve that particular mystery.

But as criminally underrated as boringness and boring, mundane detective work specifically were, if his life proceeds in its current direction, he wouldn’t mind taking it up just for something to do.

No criticism intended, he adds hastily, as he sometimes does, just in case the universe has handy mind-reading powers. No need to go back to danger and weirdness and death just yet. Possibly ever, if that could be arranged. Although, the universe's quite unlikely to listen to him, even if it had the ability to listen to his thoughts. He’s thought some pretty unsavoury things about it in his time. It had not been entirely undeserved. Has Dirk mentioned he's been getting bored?)  

“Okay,” Farah says, giving his rambling monologuing a well-deserved break. That, too, is something he appreciates about her. Always getting back on track, always getting things done. That’s Farah for you.

Dirk grins at her. He may quite possibly be experiencing a genuine sugar high. (His treshold when it comes to that is quite high, if he does say so himself. Todd says that's cause it's his natural state, but really, what does Todd know? About this topic, specifically, at least - he needs no help from Dirk in putting himself down.)

“Did you just throw a gummy bear pumpkin at me?”

“Seriously, Dirk, why?” Todd joins Farah.

Sometimes his friends really have a talent for stating the obvious.

“You caught it, didn’t you?” His grin widens.

It's simply unacceptable for any of them to not get high on sugar together right now. It's the Halloween spirit!

“You know you could’ve just given it to me or asked me to come over? Like a normal person.”

“That would’ve been boring. Can you catch one with your mouth?” After a bit of consideration, Dirk revises his question. “Can you catch two with your mouth?”

Farah interrupts him before he can continue  his line of questioning. “I am not going to catch any sweet with my mouth. Also, you two are cleaning this office, so you don’t want to throw sweets around.”

“Actually…,” Todd starts, “we might’ve already done that. A bit.”

“A little bit,” Dirk agrees.

Farah shakes her head and smiles. “Alright, I give up. Today is gonna be all celebration and marketing and-” She seems to think over her decision one last time. “And no work.”

Dirk cheers and internally thanks might actually be his own - but let’s be real, mostly Tina’s influence. Her girlfriend has done her good.

Todd lets out a breath of relief that's in no way as subtle as he probably thinks it to be. Farah eats her sweet and adds, “Unless there’s a case, of course.”

None of them expect there to be a case or anything, really, and maybe that should’ve warned Dirk - the universe is like a kettle that way. It likes to strike when no one is looking.

“Can I have one too?” The sudden familiar voice sends Dirk’s chair back on the ground violently and Farah reaching for her gun.

Behind him, he can sense Todd tensing the way he does before facing some danger for the sake of Dirk (or, well, you know, the people Todd would put himself in danger to protect. Usually Dirk).

“Chill,” says Hugo Friedkin, temporary leader of an organisation that has robbed Dirk of decades of his life and idiot extraordinaire. He does not have giant scissors in his chest at this very moment, which is a marginal improvement to the last time Dirk has seen him.

Where it looked like he had died, courtesy of the giant scissors.

Dirk lets out a very intelligible screech. Farah’s hands tense around the gun she's aiming at Friedkin, who looks very lost, before his expression changes and he holds up his hands pacifyingly.

“Hey,” he says. ”I don’t know what this guy did to you, but God knows I know he's one messed up fucker. But he’s not here to hurt you. Right?”

“Yeah,” Friedkin says, “and I was gonna say that, before you went all _screamy_ and _gun-happy_ .” He looks at Farah. “Those _hurt_.”

“Who are you?” Farah replies, without lowering it.

“Yeah, and why are you talking to yourself?” Todd adds, having inched closer to Dirk. Which is also a danger thing he's started to do. Dirk thinks it's quite touching when it doesn't worry the living hell out of him.

“That’s like, a hard question,” possibly-Friedkin says. “I’m sort of Hugo Friedkin and sort of the universe. Sometimes. Not completely or, not completely all the time.”

“I’m Estevez. Remember, we worked together on that mindfuck of a case. The one with the dog who was the girl and the girl who was the dog and time travel.”

“Of course I remember you,” Dirk says, “but aren’t you supposed to be dead? Both of you?”

Simultaneously, Todd asks, “Hold up, you’re Estevez and Friedkin? At the same time?”

Farah now does lower her gun.

“It’s complicated,” Friedkin-and/or-Estevez says with an eyeroll. Actually, Dirk is quite sure it's Estevez.

“I - I’m Estevez by the way,” point for Dirk, “did die. Or at least something close to it. Then, I woke up in this place. It’s- too weird to describe. Even after the weird shit we saw when I was still alive. This guy said only my consciousness can survive outside it though, so now I guess we have to share.”

He sounds thoroughly unenthused. Dirk gives him a sympathetic look. He can't imagine being stuck in Friedkin’s body and frankly, he doesn't want to.

“I mean, you could survive outside too,” actual Friedkin says. “You’d just have to become like me.”

Friedkin’s body rolls its eyes again. “ _Yeah_ , I’d prefer to stay myself, with my own mind and soul.”

“So wait,” Dirk says, “Friedkin’s mind and soul aren’t his own?”

“Well, duh,” Friedkin says. “I told you, I’m sort of the universe too.”

“How about,” Farah suggests, “we start at the beginning. Who the hell is Friedkin?”

“Oh yeah,” Dirk says. “Remember when I was away? This guy was a leader at Blackwing.”

Farah tenses again, eying Friedkin and her gun warily. Probably worrying about stopping Friedkin without hurting Estevez. The detective _did_ threaten them all with a gun back in the day, but in his defense, it had been a very confusing time for everyone.

“Hey, I helped you with that old dude,” Friedkin retorts. “I’m like, all good now. Reformed.”

“He did,” Dirk confirms with slight reluctance. “I wouldn’t have gotten the boy out of Blackwing without him.”

“See? Told you. Re-form-ed.”

“We’ll see about that,” Todd replies distrustfully.

Friedkin’s body snorts. “I’d sign that,” Estevez says.

“You don’t trust him?” Farah asks.

“He’s the one who killed me,” Estevez replied. “Hard to trust someone like that. I’m keeping watch on him. And besides, the universe… I don’t really know what to think about it. I wanted to ask, Gently, you have experience with it, right?”

“It’s not that I don’t have experience with it,” Dirk says, “it’s just that my experiences with the universe have been varied and it is, in fact, difficult to call something an experience with the universe when the universe is, in fact, everything and as such everything could be called an experience with the universe.”

“Right,” Estevez says, “so you’re not its biggest fan either.”

Now Todd snorts. “You could say that. Wait, he's the one who killed you?”

“Solved it,” Dirk mutters bitterly.

“You were looking into my death?” Estevez asks, touched. "Man, that's weird to say."

“A little,” Dirk replies, uncomfortable. “I mean, I wasn't uninvolved in getting you killed. Actually, you wouldn't have died at all if it weren't for me, so. I kind of owed it to you.”

Todd and Farah look at him like they want to argue. They probably do - he's lucky enough to have them staunchly in his corner, except at that very moment it feels more misguided, to put it nicely.

“Hey, it's not your fault. You didn't kill me,” says Estevez who is apparently also too nice a guy for his own good. No surprise there. “Thanks. For looking into it.”

Dirk shrugs, throat closing up. He can't exactly argue in this situation.

“Yeah,” Friedkin chimes in, surprisingly. “Like, if you hadn't been there, this dude would've been killed by those baldies. So actually, this is all… Good.”

Dirk has not considered that. He feels a little lighter and a little like crying.

“You're really not in a position to say that,” Estevez says.

“I did like, save you.”

Estevez raises his? Friedkin's? eyebrows masterfully. “You said you were supposed to do that.”

“Yeah, but I also like, felt bad," Friedkin says and mutters, "You kill someone _once_. Let's uh, stop talking about me killing people. , The universe wants me to tell you something. Warn you..” He pauses. “I want me to warn you?”

“We get it, it’s complicated,” Todd says.

Dirk does not, in fact  get it and he sincerely doubts any of them do. But he's really not of a mind to deal with existential questions right now and makes the executive decision to leave this up to future Dirk. 

“What’s the warning?” Dirk asks, feeling a little nauseated. Of course he’s known something is coming. Something is always coming. That's his life. But for a while, even through the boredom, he’s felt something _big_ approaching. Something has gone or is going all wrong - and now it's starting to show.

“Stay on your paths,” Friedkin’s body says, sounding neither like Friedkin or Estevez, but like something not entirely human anymore. “When things go like, _bad,_  don’t mess around. Do what you’re supposed to do.”

“That’s it?” Todd asks incredulously.

“Well, yeah,” Friedkin says, all back to unadulterated Friedkin-ish Ness. Dirk never thought he'd be glad for it. “There’s no, like, instruction manuals. Or reports.”

He sounds quite smug about that.

“You can’t tell us any more?” Farah asks, all professional.

“Nah.”

“Do you even know more than we do?” Todd again.

“Of course! Sort of. Yeah, I think so. It’s like, the connection is _tricky_ . I know like, everything, but I don’t like, _get it_ , you see?”

“Great!” Dirk says. “So that’s basically the same as always. Lovely visit, please never come again.”

“Don’t I get at least one of those?” Friedkin points at the sweets. “You owe me, dude.”

“Nope.” Dirk pauses. “Is there a way we can give sweets to Estevez, but not to you?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Friedkin says, “we’re like, the same person.”

“We’re really not,” says Estevez. “But it's fine.”

“No,” Dirk insists, grabbing a bag of gore-ish sweets. “It's Halloween.”

“Thanks, man,” says Estevez or possibly Friedkin and smiles. And then disappears.

Well, that happened.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm v glad I finished this, it really cut to a close there. Inspiration for this fic was drawn from: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11254926  
> Which is beautiful and also from one of my favourite dghda writers


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